Although the Lexington and Concord conflict has been spun indelibly into the patriotic fabric of the U.S. as the start of the Revolution, it was in truth a minor conflict with relatively few casualties — but it spurred thousands of colonial men to take up arms against what they perceived as a foreign oppressor. It also made a hero of Paul Revere, whose famous ride preceding the battle became another icon of American patriotism. The U.S. now cautiously approaches the 250th anniversary of this transformative event, its status as the world’s largest economy no longer assured or taken for granted. The colonial Americans of 1775 could scarcely have imagined that their actions would lead to the creation of the most powerful nation in world history as they faced the most powerful nation of the late 1700s. What will the future hold for the more distant heirs of that revolution?
I can speak computer. Can you?
International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) released the first FORTRAN compiler to the public on April 19, 1957. The first trial run, at Westinghouse, produced an error message due to a missing comma, and from there on the language would spread rapidly throughout the field of high-performance computing, much of which used IBM mainframes and was thus already well-equipped to use it.
What is FORTRAN? Named after International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM)’s “Mathematical Formula Translating System,” FORTRAN was the first modern high-level programming language, and as such it was designed to replace assembly language — the closest thing you can get to hand-coding everything as ones and zeroes. FORTRAN made the task of programming far simpler by reducing the number of operational statements by roughly a factor of 20. It was quickly adopted for computationally intensive programming, which happened to be most programming at a time when most machines were huge contraptions that might cost millions of dollars. In fact, it’s still so useful for scientific applications that modern supercomputers still use FORTRAN benchmark programs to test their speed and run some of their more complex models.
FORTRAN is one of the few computing dinosaurs still lumbering across the tech landscape today, and although most of the languages that came afterward developed their own ways of doing things, they all owe FORTRAN and inventor John Backus for getting the ball rolling on programming languages.
The article The End of Gold as a Weight on the American Economy originally appeared on Fool.com.
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